


Locker Buddies

by Innwich



Category: Outlast (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Hiding, Locker, Tight Spaces
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-15
Updated: 2015-02-15
Packaged: 2018-03-12 23:10:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3358769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Innwich/pseuds/Innwich
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Waylon should have checked that the locker was empty before he shut the door on himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Locker Buddies

Waylon ran. His breathing was ragged. He was going to tear a hole in his side.

He fumbled his way down another dirty hallway. He wasn’t sure where he was anymore. The asylum looked different from when he’d been an employee. He didn’t think he’d seen so many cells during his employment here.

He certainly hadn’t had a fat man chasing him through the halls before.

The fat man had a hole in his face where his nose should be. Either another patient had bitten his nose off, or somehow the man had ripped his own nose off in a fit of madness. Either way, Waylon had no desire to find out for himself.

Waylon jumped over a barricade of broken tables and chairs. The camcorder swung like lead in his hand. The batteries jangled in his pockets. He prayed he would survive long enough to use them again. Blaire had broken his last hope, smashed it into smithereens like he’d done to the radio, turned it into metal bits and electronic scraps. Waylon had to find his way out of this place. No one from the outside was going to come and save him.

Footsteps thundered behind him. Footsteps of a giant.

With his heart lodged in his throat, Waylon sped up. His mind was frazzling around the edges, overloading on fear and adrenaline. He tried the next door he found, and it was unlocked. Behind it was a small room with a locker tucked into a corner. He almost sobbed with relief, when he pulled open the locker door and slammed it shut behind himself.

He was safe for the moment.

But there was something wrong about the locker. It was smaller than the other lockers, narrower, and Waylon could hear someone… breathing?

“Fuck!” a voice said.

A fist caught Waylon on his cheekbone. The blow was hard enough to break his skin. He bumped his head on the locker door and his vision swam.

“No-” Waylon started to say. Then he was kneed in the belly, low in the gut. It knocked the air out of him. He had nothing left to throw up; he dry-heaved and barely managed to keep his bile down in his stomach.

Waylon groped in the dark for something to hold onto, anything to keep him in the locker. His fingers brushed against fabric. He grabbed it and hung onto it.

“Let go of me!” The stranger tried to twist his jacket out of Waylon’s grip. “Fuck!”

Waylon tightened his hold and clung to the man. If he was kicked out of the locker, he doubted he could find another hiding spot without the fat man seeing him. It would only be a matter of time before the fat man found him. He had to hang on for Lisa and the kids. He had to stay alive. He had to get back to them.

The locker shook as the fat man stepped into the room.

“Come out, little pig,” the fat man said.

Waylon had his back to the locker door. He couldn’t see out of the door, but he knew the fat man was standing mere feet away from him. The thin piece of metal was the only thing separating the fat man from him and the other man in the locker.

The stranger stopped struggling. He became still as a rock and his breathing turned shallow. They’d both be dead if Waylon came tumbling out of the locker now.

They were packed so tightly together that it was difficult to tell where each of them ended and started. Waylon had an arm going numb under someone’s elbow, either his or the man’s. The two of them were twisted into one big pretzel that would crumble into pieces if either one of them so much as tried to pull away. Waylon’s entire body was stitched together by patches of pins and needles and gaping spaces that he couldn’t feel anymore.

Waylon knew the stranger could smell the death and fear on him.

(And blood, he didn’t forget the blood. The soles of his feet were wet and slick. Waylon had waded through trickles and streams and rivers of it; he was wearing a cocktail of dead men’s blood.)

It was getting too cramped in the locker. Waylon swore the walls were shrinking down on them. There wasn’t going to be enough space to hold the two of them. They would spill out of the three dimensions and into the fourth dimension. Time. They would travel in time. Go faster than the speed of light, 186,282 miles per second in vacuum. Go so fast they wouldn’t hear themselves scream, because sound travelled slower than light.

(“Like how we always see the lightning before we hear the thunder, Lisa.”)

Waylon had to scream.

A hand was slapped over his mouth. Waylon started choking on spit and stale air because he couldn’t breathe through his mouth. The stranger was squeezing his mouth shut so tightly that his teeth ached.

“Hngh,” the fat man said.

After a heavy pause, the fat man finally lumbered out of the room.

They waited for a beat or two.

A loud racket started up at the far end of the hallway.

Waylon stumbled out of the locker, and fell onto his knees. He scraped his palms on the floor, but didn’t break his camcorder. He coughed and retched, and pink saliva pooled next to his hand.

The stranger stepped around Waylon. It was the first time that Waylon had a good look at him.

He was holding a camcorder that looked like the one that Waylon had taken from his own cell. He didn’t dress like the doctors that worked here. The front of his brown jacket was creased, where Waylon had grabbed onto it for dear life, and his shoes were stained, but the rest of him was spotless.

The man was an oasis in a blood-red desert.

“Help. Help me,” Waylon whispered hoarsely. The words scraped his throat. It’d been a long time since he’d gotten a drop of water in himself. The asylum was a desert, suffering was its sun, and Waylon was a dead man walking. “Help me.”

“Another one of Murkoff’s victims,” the man said. He wasn’t talking to Waylon; he was talking to his camcorder. “This fucking hellhole is filled with them.”

Waylon didn’t know what the man was seeing through the lens of the camcorder. Another patient? Another mad man left to rot in the asylum? Another lab rat to be stuffed into the Engine? Waylon didn’t care. He had to try. He had to get back to Lisa and the boys. He had to get out of here. “Help me.”

The stranger let his camcorder lingered on Waylon for another moment, before he strode out of the room like a man on a mission.

Waylon walked slowly to the open door. He didn’t want to go back to the fray again, but the safety of the room was temporary. The fat man would return. The stranger had already sprinted down the hall and vanished around the corner. His footsteps grew fainter and fainter, until Waylon couldn’t hear him through the maze of walls and cells anymore.

“Help me please.”


End file.
